On Wednesday, after many years of intending to go, I visited Ellis Island for the first time. It’s the place in New York Harbor where beginning in 1890 immigrants entering the United States through New York City waterways would be processed. I only stayed about a half hour, because I didn’t like the energy in there and I was already tired. But one of the displays there left a massive impact on me before I left.
In the section of the museum talking about how various groups of people on the continent were treated, there was a board dedicated to the trans-atlantic slave trade. It distilled the horrors of the Middle Passage down to a few, appropriately grotesque sentences and ended by stating 15 percent of all enslaved Africans shipped across the sea in that inhumane manner died during the journey due to disease. I read that sentence, and I was instantly struck by a stunning realization:
I am supposed to be here.
The African lineage in my blood survived being sold to European slave traders and the Middle Passage, not to mention the generations of chattel slavery, threat of lynchings, exploitive sharecropping, bitter and racist southern Jim Crow regulations in the aftermath of reconstruction, blatant murder and razing of thriving Black towns, and attacks through the 60s civil rights movement. My genes could have been wiped out long before I ever arrived. Instead, I am the descendant of the ones who survived and the continued embodiment of those who were murdered. My ancestors would be immensely proud of me.
For a long time I’ve felt as though I don’t truly have a home, because the United States was founded on anti-Blackness, and I don’t know from what specific African tribes I originated. But the United States is my home. My lineage survived hell many, many times over to be embodied in me in this place. If I am here after all of that, it is because I am supposed to be. I belong here.
At some point I want to visit the site in Ghana, West Africa, where some of my ancestors were imprisoned and tortured before being herded onto those death traps and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. I want to go there to pay my respects and let the spirits of my ancestors know I have survived and am grateful for their blood coursing through my veins.